Events

Post written by Michelle MacQueen

Today was our final day of the Colloquium. We drove back to the Centre for Sound Communities from Chéticamp for our last presentation.

Our final Keynote presenter was Dr. Christina Leza. She is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist whose research interests include indigenous peoples of the Americas, discourse and identity, racial and ethnic discourses, grassroots activism, and cognitive anthropology. Her most recent research has focused on border indigenous activist responses to U.S.-Mexico border policy in collaboration with grassroots indigenous organizers on the U.S. southern border. She has also examined broader discourse patterns among indigenous grassroots activists in the U.S. and Latin America. She is the author of the book Divided Peoples: Policy, Activism and Indigenous Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Border, and a chapter on activism, identity, and hip-hop at U.S.-Mexico border for a volume on Indigenous music and modernity.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Her presentation was titled Articulating Indigenous Soul in Search of Healing.

She talked about how distinct (and often contested) Indigenous identities in the U.S.-Mexico border region are experienced. She also discussed how these identities are expressed through engagement with sonic articulations of Indigenous roots and colonial oppressions.

She told us how this work emerged from field research with Native and Mexica activists in the Tucson/Phoenix, Arizona region. Drawing from field observations, interviews, analysis of song tracks and videos by selected conscious hip hop artists, she examined how individuals and groups in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands perform indigeneities in the context of historical conflicts between Native Americans and Chicanos over claims of indigeneity.

She introduced us to two Indigenous hip hop groups: Shining Soul, a group composed of emcee Liaizon of the Tohono O’odham Nation, Chicano emcee Bronze Candidate, and DJ Reflekshin of the Navajo Nation; and Mexica hip hop/punk/electronic band Aztlan Underground.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

Her presentation built on Alejandro Nava’s exploration of hip hop as a search for the soul. Her presentation considered how Indigenous artists of distinct cultural ancestries sonically articulate Indigenous soul through the select use of ancestral musical traditions and Indigenous protest references.

She described how both Shining Soul and Aztlan Underground emphasize healing as a central goal of their sounds. They embrace music as ceremony, medicine, and a source of healing. Yet, she explained that through their musical sound production, both bands communicate their positions as oppressed and “conflicted moderns.”

She played us the songs “Get Up,” “No Mercy,” by Shining Soul and “Decolonize,” “My Blood is Red,” and “Indigenous” by Aztlan Underground. She explained how in these examples, they are simultaneously producing “frequencies of healing” and frequencies of violence in protest against historical and contemporary forms of colonial oppression. Ultimately, both bands communicate the predicament of Indigenous peoples who must constantly work to heal under the onslaught of settler colonial violence.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

She concluded by showing us how the search for healing may be particularly challenging for Indigenous peoples with a migration lineage shaped by the imposition of international borders and forced relocation.

We ended the 26th ICTM Colloquium with a publication workshop. This workshop was filled with productive brainstorms of how to turn the discussions we heard over the past few days into published material. Our conversations were guided by Christina Leza’s final presentation slide with a quote from Shining Soul, noted below. This message resonated with our experiences at this Colloquium and we hope that it will reverberate throughout our publication.

Stay tuned!

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

Post written by Michelle MacQueen

Today, we started our own migrations across Cape Breton Island.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

First, we stopped at the Highland Village in Iona. We were able to learn about some of the history and cultural practices of Gaels on the Island. We learned a few Gaelic songs and sang them together while we had a Milling Frolic – a process to shrink and soften cloth where people (usually women) would accompany their work with songs to make the process more enjoyable. Though milling cloth is no longer very common, people still gather for milling frolics to beat the cloth back and forth and share songs and stories.

Then we moved to the Iona Heights Inn to hear from our second Keynote presenter, Alex Chávez.

Alex gave us an introduction to his work in a public presentation on Wednesday, but today his presentation was titled Sound, Citizenship, and Aural Ecologies of Place.

He spoke about his decade of research among Mexican migrant musicians in the United States. He emphasized the social and political mandates shaping their art within the context of intensified attacks on their communities.

The presentation focused on a new research project listening to the city of Chicago and specifically Latinos in Chicago. He talked about the importance of listening: how might listening animate memory and be a vehicle for collective witness? How does sound figure into creative cultural citizenship?

Photo credit: Rachael Murphy

Looking at Chicago (and as is the case elsewhere in the United States), Alex spoke of how Latino migrants have moved from a kind of mobility to emplacement; they have settled and there is a general realization by dominant groups that “they’re staying here.” He used this example to talk about the social feelings of what it means to feel at home, and what roles sound and music can play in activating those feelings.

What might you hear – or not hear – when entering a community? What distinguishes music from sound? He explored these questions by looking at youth-based radio, podcast, and soundscape projects in Chicago. From these projects, he told us about how sounds have the ability to claim public space. Sound is significant for how people exist and sound gives merit to what can exist.

Photo credit: Rachael Murphy

He talked about the “official discourse” about the neighbourhoods of Chicago. Often, these stories talk about the segregation of space: every neighbourhood is divided into its own separate, discrete place. He described how art can be a creative engagement to move beyond these “official” stories: we can push the boundaries of who is allowed to create a semblance of home, how we hear it, and how we experience it. Through these artistic engagements, we can amplify the intent of whose voices are heard.

To illustrate these points, Alex shared his experiences working as a producer for Olmeca and showed us the music video for “Define.” 

He ended his presentation by emphasizing how we need to take seriously the capacity of sound as an aesthetic site of citizenship.

Next, we drove to Chéticamp. The following two groups of presentations were hosted at École NDA.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

First, we had a group of presentations under the theme Mobilizing Memories.

Dr. Stephanie Conn presented first. She is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the performance practice of Gaelic traditional music, with an ongoing interest in music of the 20th-21st centuries. She is also a singer of Gaelic songs. Stephanie is the Cape Breton contributor for Memorial University of Newfoundland’s forthcoming online exhibit of MacEdward Leach’s archival recordings.

Her presentation was titled Traces, memories and monuments: Archive and Cape Breton Gaelic Singing.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

She focused on the role of recording archives in present-day Cape Breton. She notes that Gaelic singers turn to recording archives as cultural storehouses, learning tools, and representations of the song canon. Singers also invest these archives with authoritative power. Because of digitization, these archives are largely available to the public. However, Stephanie warns that archives are repositories of traces, evidence of past individual experiences. They are not monuments representing collective memory.

Her presentation built on her previous research. She described how there is a tension between the weight of a recorded source and a lived experience. Archives are static manifestations of cultural practices, a representation of memory which might only reflect a limited aspect of the more dynamic living canon. Archives also involved re-evaluating and re-shaping through collectors, ethnomusicologists, and Gaelic singers themselves.

Her presentation considered how current ways of learning Gaelic songs are divorced from embodied performance and first-hand memory.  Yet she notes that contemporary singers can and do attempt to engage with these traces. By having embodied engagements with these archival traces, we can reimagine archives to better represent, contextualize, and embody Gaelic singing in Cape Breton. She concluded by sharing some of her own embodied experiences with Gaelic songs and sang one of these songs for us.

Next was Dr. Meghan Forsyth. She is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, specializing in the instrumental music and dance traditions of the Acadian diaspora and francophone North Atlantic. She is an active applied ethnomusicologist and her current research explores intradiasporic transnationalism and secular pilgrimage in the context of the pentennial Congrès mondial acadien, as well as the social history of instrumental music of les Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Quebec. In 2016, she produced a SSHRC-funded, multimedia exhibit and website on Acadian set and step dance traditions on Prince Edward Island, in association with le Musée acadien de l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

Her presentation was called Performing la Grande Acadie: Public Memory and Pilgrimage at le Congrès mondial acadien.

The presentation focused on the pentennial Congrès mondial acadien (Acadian World Congress) as a site of convergence, renewal, and redefinition for the global Acadian community since its inaugural meeting in 1994. She described how the Congrès has been a place for pilgrimages to the Acadian “homeland” as well as celebrations of intradiasporic relations.

Specifically, she examined how the Acadian diaspora is reimagined through the lens of cultural tourism and secular pilgrimage. She told us some of the deep-seated and often romanticized public memory of the Acadians’ story of mid-eighteenth century exile, survival, and return. She notes that this story in public memory acts as a unifying discourse and informs how Acadians (and the rest of the world) define, participate in, and perform Acadie.

While there is this unifying story, there are also tensions between the unity and diversity of the diaspora. These tensions are exposed as regional differences between Acadian communities separated by the Deportations (1755–1763). However, these differences are debated and celebrated.

She told us how Maritime Acadians’ political and musical connections to their First Nations and Celtic neighbours and American ‘cousins’ are embodied through musical citation, collaboration, homage, and themes of perseverance and shared minority experience. She demonstrated how the musical enactment of intradiasporic transnationalism (and other relationships afforded by the Congrès) provide a platform for its participants to negotiate complex relationships between diverse local and transnational identities associated with membership in la Grande Acadie—the full Acadian diaspora.

 

The next pair of presentations followed the theme Houses of Worship, Sacred Sounds.

Our first presenter was Dr. Julia Byl, who gave a public film screening on Tuesday. Her presentation was called Chants of Rock and Water: Cross-Religious Devotion in Maritime Southeast Asia.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

She described to us how the South Asian communities residing in Malaysia and Singapore are doubly dispersed. The initial migration was tied to resource extraction, and enabled by the proximity of British colonies. Their subsequent dispersal occurred when the colony fragmented into nation states: postcolonial Singapore and Malaysia created different narratives of “native” and “foreigner,” resulting in very different outcomes for South Asian communities.

She introduced us to the Tamil population of North Sumatra and described them as divided from Malaysia and Singapore by the Malacca strait and the experience of Dutch colonialism and Indonesian citizenship. Yet in spite of these divisions, there are continuities within these Tamil communities. Julia described some vectors across them:

1. The presence of Hindu temples, Marian shrines, and mosques and dargahs connected to the religions of India’s coasts in all three places
2. The discourse of belonging
3. The occasional pilgrimages that connect the Tamil populations of the three countries

 

 

Her presentation contended that power and protection are the primary sonic offerings of these houses of worship. These offerings enable a continued relevance within South Asian communities themselves, and a persistent purchase in the religious ecosystem of maritime Southeast Asia.

 

Next up was the Director of the Centre for Sound Communities, Marcia Ostashewski. Her presentation was titled Byzantine Ukrainian Congregational Singing in Cape Breton: A Living Music.

She showed us how the history and contemporary cultural practices of Ukrainians on the Canadian prairies has been well-documented, extensively studied, and highly celebrated in academic and public culture. However, she notes that the contributions of Ukrainians in Atlantic Canada are much less so.

Her presentation attended to stories and music that are centred at the Holy Ghost Ukrainian Catholic Church in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia an island at Canada’s eastern, Atlantic coast. She focused on the Byzantine Ukrainian congregational chant-based responsorial singing that is part of liturgical celebrations in this church. Marcia spoke from her perspective as the parish’s lead singer – cantor or djak. In doing so, she drew on several years of collaborative research with this community.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

Throughout the presentation, she explored how musical practice has shaped social life and experiences for herself, for co-researchers and for other interlocutors in the field. She shared stories and sounds to illustrate ways in which identities have been constituted by and are constitutive of musical worlds in motion.

She told us about historical migration relating to Ukrainians in Canada generally. But she also explained some of her own migrations, having grown up on the prairies and lived in most regions of the country and settled recently in Cape Breton. She explained how all of these migrations have shaped musical practice, senses of place, and home. These aspects were shaped not only for her, but also for her family, and for people in different places where she lived and worked, and with whom she has sung.

She concluded by noting that while the musical imaginaries, relations, and practices discussed in this presentation are part of her lived experience– they also embody a history of cultural politics within modern multicultural Canada.

 

We ended the night with a concert at Église Saint-Pierre in Chéticamp. The concert was titled Songs and Stories of Cape Breton. Since we were in Chéticamp, it told some of the stories from this region:

 

In the early 1600s, the first French settlers arrived in the new world bringing with them a rich oral tradition of songs and stories. The tradition of orally transmitting songs and stories continued even after the forced removal of these Acadians from their lands and their dispersion throughout the thirteen British colonies and to Britain and France. Many Acadians eventually found their way back, and founded new communities, mostly on marginal lands owned now by the British. Because of its geographic isolation from other communities, the Acadians who settled Chéticamp in the late 1700s preserved their language, culture and rich song and story tradition that has survived to this day. The concert programme featured some of these traditional songs that have travelled through time for hundreds of years. The concert also featured songs of other groups who have migrated to Cape Breton, including those of Ukrainian and Scottish traditions. Overall, this concert was a collection of songs and stories that tell us about different migrations to and from Cape Breton as well as the encounters we have along the way.

 

The concert started with Le Choeur du Havre under the direction of Michel Aucoin. This choir has acquired an enviable reputation for its melodious sound and varied repertoire. True to its Acadian heritage, a good part of the choir’s repertoire is sung in French and includes traditional Acadian folk songs. Just as their repertoire, the choir members come from diverse backgrounds and this may be what lends itself to the choir’s special sound.

 

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

 

 

 

We then heard from our presenter Stephanie Conn, who sang Gaelic songs and some Puirt à beul.

 

 

Robert Deveaux shared some Acadian songs and stories with us. He is an Acadian fiddler, pianist and singer. He is also a respected researcher and collector of Acadian songs.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

We heard tunes from Colin Grant, accompanied by Robert Deveaux on the piano. Colin is a versatile fiddler at the forefront of the East Coast traditional music scene. Although he is most at home with traditional Cape Breton fiddle music, his flexibility as both a lead and side musician has given him experiences in a variety of traditional styles, in addition to folk, rock and country genres.

 

 

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

 

 

 

Chester Delaney shared some more traditional Acadian songs with us. He is an Acadian singer, known for his unique style renditions of traditional songs where he accompanies himself on the fiddle.

 

 

 

 

Finally, we heard from Julian Kytasty, one of the world’s premier players of the bandura (Ukrainian lute-harp), and the instrument’s leading North American exponent. He performed songs and stories of the Ukrainian immigrant experience alongside Marcia Ostashewski, soprano.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

 

 

 

 

 

The concert closed with some fiddle tunes by Colin, Chester, and Julian (who played fiddle tunes on the bandura), with Robert accompanying them on the piano.

 

 

 

 

 

Unveiled at this concert was the artwork Treasures in the Hearts of Many by Betty Ann Cormier.

Photo credit: Betty Ann Cormier

Betty Ann Cormier is from Cheticamp, world capital of the hooked rug and she is a 4th generation rug hooker. Where once there were several hundred rug hookers in the area, now there are only about 30. In her younger years, Cormier used traditional patterns and colours as she was taught. But she has developed her own style, no longer sketches on the burlap first, and now hooks using bright colours and creates unique, bold patterns. Cormier’s pieces can be found all over the world in homes and galleries.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

 

 

She created a new piece in honour of the 26^th ICTM Colloquium. Inspired by the description of the Colloquium theme, Betty Ann expresses in this new piece the vast possibilities of how sounds and words travel across all parts of the world and are carried in the hearts of those treasuring them. This 16×24 inch rectangle is made up of 24 different pieces that, when set together like a puzzle, reveal a larger image as if looking through a window pane over land and sea out to the horizon. One of each of its pieces has been gifted to Colloquium presenters and partners.

Photo credit: Rachael Murphy

Post written by Michelle MacQueen

We started the second day of the Colloquium with a pair of presentations under the theme Alliances, Networks, Cosmopolitanism: Haitian Transnation and the Black Pacific.

We heard first from Dr. Gage Averill. Gage is a renowned ethnomusicologist with an over-30-year history of research into Haitian popular music. He produced an award-winning book and a Grammy-nominated CD box set, as well as a string of works dealing specifically with the cultural geography and politics of music related to Haitian immigration. He has performed with rara bands, carnival ensembles and konpa groups in Haiti and in diaspora.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

His presentation was titled Sonic Signification in the Haitian Transnation. He reflected on his years of doing research on Haitian music and culture. In this work, he has pursued two overarching research questions. The first question was what prompted his initial book project: How does music interact with and shape power?

The second question focused on Haitian cultural geography: How does music respond to, enact, and condition a sense of place and belonging– especially with migration and the emergence of a Haitian diaspora or transnation? He wrote in response to this question in a series of articles starting in 1993 followed by a sequence of chapters in edited volumes.

His presentation distilled the themes of this second research question, while looking at how it intersects with the former question about music and power. He explained to us how music has served as the primary signifier of the Haitian diaspora, even as this diaspora continuously changes shape. He showed us how music works at the boundaries and seeps through these boundaries to enact alliances and communities of shared interests. Music is the soundtrack to rituals that facilitate nostalgic immersion, and also help to negotiate the relationship of the community (koloni) to other US and Canadian communities, as well as to the changing circumstances on the island.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Gage examined the strategies and tactics of musicians based in the diaspora and in Haiti. He looked at how they sought audiences, influence and prestige through performance across national boundaries, while helping to structure the basic understanding of a Haitian transnation.

He described how this research was always structured self-consciously along the lines of the “tournée” or tour.  As such, Gage enacted the same cultural geography as the Haitian musicians with whom he worked. His paper was based on forty years of research on—and participation in—Haitian popular music, religious ceremonies, rara, carnival, festivals, and “folkloric” performance. After the presentation, the audience discussed the importance of locality and Gage shared some more stories from his work in Haiti, including experiences with music and social demonstrations that involved encounters with the police.

Next up was Dr. Gabriel Solis with a presentation titled Blues in the Black Pacific: Jazz, Community Music-Making, and Afro-Indigenous Alliances in Australia.

Gabriel Solis is a scholar of African American music and Indigenous musics of the Southwestern Pacific. He has done ethnographic and historical research with jazz musicians in the United States and with musicians in Australia and Papua New Guinea. Drawing on work in African American studies, anthropology, and history, he addresses the ways people engage the past, performing history and memory through music. Additionally, his work explores musicians’ and audiences’ interactions with and personalization of mass-mediated musical commodities in transnational circulation. He is the author of two books: one on Thelonious Monk and another on Monk’s collaborations with John Coltrane. He is also co-editor with Bruno Nettl of a collection of essays on improvisation cross-culturally.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

Gabriel started by noting when we think of jazz and where jazz is located, we do not tend to focus on the cities of Townsville and Cairns in North Queensland, Australia. Nor do the narratives of Indigenous popular music tend to connect with jazz or boogie-woogie. And yet, Gabriel told us about a small but vibrant jazz scene among Indigenous Australians and Australian South Sea Islanders. His presentation focused on how this jazz scene offers a compelling view of global processes.

He gave us information from archival and ethnographic sources in order to describe the relationships between African American soldiers stationed in North Queensland and local Indigenous families. He noted that these relationships mark a key way of understanding the cosmopolitanism of subaltern subjects.

He demonstrated how these relationships show the politics of Black Liberation emerging beyond the Atlantic, diasporic centre. Additionally, he illustrated how the relationships show long-standing Indigenous networks of exchange continuing to produce alternative centre-periphery relations despite colonial interference.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

Gabriel also described how this relationship between Indigenous peoples and African Americans through music has continued, showing us the conversation between RZA and Briggs at the Sydney Opera House.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

 

He introduced us to the music of Georgia Lee, Seaman Dan, Wilma Reading, Johnny Nicol, Shireen Malamoo, and Syvannah Doolan, and the communities in which they grew up. He contended that looking at this music and these local connections shows how a truly global history of musical movement and connection (seen from a global southern perspective) looks different from a Eurocentric history of musical globalization.

The following pair of presentations was grouped together as Public Outreach and Education.

Dr. Alisha Lola Jones presented first. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University (Bloomington). She is working on a book called Flaming?: The Peculiar Theo-Politics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, under contract with Oxford University Press. This book breaks ground by analyzing the role of gospel music making in constructing and renegotiating gender identity among black men. Dr. Jones’ research interests include musical masculinities, global pop music, future studies, ecomusicology, music and theology, the music industry, musics of the African diaspora and emerging research on music and future foodways (gastromusicology) in conjunction with The Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley, CA.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Her presentation was titled “Be Grateful, We Celebrate Black History Month”: Issues in African Americans Practitioning Gospel Among European Americans.

She started her presentation by noting the passing of the gospel music icon Edwin Hawkins on January 15, 2018. After touring the world, four-time Grammy Award winner Hawkins realized that there was not sufficient information covering the history and development of Black sacred music heritage and contemporary practice. Hawkins convened the first Music & Arts Seminar in San Francisco, California in 1979– what would become one of several organizations filling in a void in gospel music cultural preservation through mobile public arts education.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Dr. Jones explained how these organizations often spike in activity annually during the summer among African American practitioners and in February among non-African American gospel enthusiasts. Highlighting this disparity, she asked: to what extent is bias sustained through the accepted seasonality of black music education in the U.S.? More plainly, she examined what is in it for folks who share their music outside of their communities. Drawing on sentiments heard in the field (including her own work in arts leadership), Dr. Jones described sort of vulnerabilities and exploitation that occurs in these seasonal instances of black music education.

She ended her presentation with some calls to action:

• Invest time in studying black sacred music with practitioners and scholars.
• Include African American scholars and practitioners in the development and institutionalization of the research.
• Offer equitable compensation, accounting for the invisible labor of training people whose potential cultural insensitivity is anxiety inducing.
• Have an answer to the question: What is in it for them as they share their knowledge?
• Be prepared for them to decline engagement for whatever reason.
• Avoid erasing their labor by citing your sources verbally and in written form.
• And finally, despite all of our misgivings about European American’s non-committal relationship promoting formal training in black sacred music, “be grateful, we celebrate black history month.”

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

Next, Huib Schippers presented Encounters Festivals: Creating cultural meeting grounds for artists, communities and cultural diplomacy.

Huib Schippers is the Director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution. He has a long and diverse history of engagement with music across various settings and cultures. With a Master’s degree in English literature and twenty years of traditional training as a professional sitar player, he proceeded with (partially overlapping) careers in performance, education, research, journalism, the record trade, arts policy, and project management. He is the author of Facing the music: Shaping music education from a global perspective and Sustainable futures for music cultures: An ecological perspective, which he co-edited with Catherine Grant.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

His presentation focused on his time at the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia between 2005 and 2013. While at this institution, he was part of a team that organized four festivals that explored cultural meetings between Australian Indigenous people and white settlers (2005); Australia and the Asia Pacific (2007); China and Australia (2010); and India and Australia (2013) respectively.

Involving students and staff from Queensland Conservatorium, artists from the cultural area and Australia, and cultural and intellectual leaders, the events aimed to fearlessly explore musical meetings and interactions–warts and all–not avoiding issues like appropriation, inherent racism and imbalances of power, but also celebrating and showcasing the benefits of various levels of cultural exchange. His presentation noted key aspects of these festivals in an effort to highlight some of the complexities and rewards of intercultural work. The discussion of this presentation focused on the role of artistic festivals and public arts events to move beyond tokenistic multiculturalism and to work harder to make meaningful intercultural events.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

Dr. Ameera Nimjee led us in a public dance workshop on Kathak Dance in Hindustani Music Culture. She is a trained kathak (North Indian classical) dancer, and continues to study, perform, and teach in Canada, the United States, and India. Her publications include book chapters in Music in the American Diasporic Wedding and Dance Matters Too: Markets, Memories, Identities. A member of the Ismaili community, she was Creative Director of the Jubilee Arts Festival at Lisbon, with over 50,000 in attendance. She worked for several years in writing, programming, and curation at the Royal Ontario Museum and Aga Khan Museum, and has published a journal article on music in museums.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

The afternoon sessions began with a session titled Political Agendas in Borderlands.

We heard first from Dr. Kaley Mason, who also gave a public lecture on Monday. His presentation today was titled Mollywood at the Borderlands: Songs of South Indian Solidarity with Latinidad.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

He described how the people of Southwestern India have experienced widespread economic emigration since the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala was formed in 1956. After electing India’s first communist government in 1957, Kerala’s strong unions discouraged investment in industry, which prompted many workers to seek economic opportunities abroad. As a result, nearly every family has an archive of stories about migration and encounter.

These themes that have figured prominently in the region’s film industry, Mollywood. Until recently, the cinema focused on migration to the Middle East, but the 2017 film, Comrade in America, portrays a young Indian communist leader who travels to Nicaragua to join others on a journey to the Mexico-US border. Drawing on conversations with the film makers and analysis of the score, Kaley’s presentation examined how repurposing a popular communist anthem expressed solidarity with asylum seekers and refugees against the backdrop of the Trump Administration’s anti-immigration policies.

 

Next, we heard from Dr. Rehanna Kheshgi. She is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on gender, sexuality, and the body at the intersections of popular, folk, and sacred music and dance performance in India. She is currently working on a book that explores contemporary performances of gender and sexuality through Bihu, the springtime Assamese New Year’s festival. Her article “Navigating Generational Frictions Through Bihu Festival Performance in Assam, India” was published in MUSICultures, and her essay “Performing Assam in Urban Spaces: Bihu on the City Stage” was published in the edited volume Sounding Cities: Auditory Transformations in Berlin, Chicago and Kolkata by LIT Verlag.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

Her presentation was titled Bodo Nritya: Mobilizing Indigenous Music and Dance in the Bengal Borderlands. She told us about the migration of people from Bangladesh into Assam, India. She described how this migration has been recast by consecutive political administrations in terms of citizenship and religious conflict, decentring struggles for control over land and natural resources.

Violent conflicts between Bodo indigenous activists and Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam have gained international attention. However, Rehanna notes that the roots of these conflicts are often obscured. Reporting usually fails to engage with the complex history of this borderland region, notably the long history of colonialism and the various “integration” versus “isolation” approaches that have occurred over the years.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

Rehanna’s lecture presented how indigenous religious practices of the Bodo community are being transformed into raw materials for supporting tribal sovereignty claims in Assam through a newly codified performance tradition called “Bodo Nritya.”

Drawing on fieldwork with indigenous choreographers, performers, and cultural activists in Bodo villages as well as in Kokrajhar (the capital of the imagined Bodo homeland “Bodoland”), Rehanna showed us how music and dance performance advances an embodied political agenda that is taking shape in the borderlands of Bengal.

 

Next, we had another pair of presentations under the theme Modes of Remembrance.

First was Dr. Melissa Bilal. She is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Armenia. In collaboration with Lerna Ekmekcioglu, she is working on Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Digital Archive, a book and digital humanities project focusing on the lives and works of twelve Ottoman-born Armenian activist women writers. Recent work includes the article Lullabies and the Memory of Pain: Armenian Women’s Remembrance of the Past in Turkey and a CD project to be released later this year called Voice Signatures: Recordings of Russian Armenian POWs in German Camps, 1916-1918. Bilal founded the Feminist Armenian Research Collective (FemArc) in 2017 while she was a visiting scholar of History at MIT.

Her presentation was titled Injuries of Reconciliation: Being an Armenian in Post-Genocide Burunkışla.

She focused on the lives of Armenians who were displaced from Burunkışla, a village in the city of Yozgat, central Turkey. She noted there is a growing scholarly literature on Armenians who survived the genocide of 1915-1922 and continued living in Turkey; yet this literature seldom includes the accounts of those who “remained” outside Istanbul in the decades following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey and eventually relocated to nearby and distant cities.

Since 2012, Melissa has been conducting interviews in Burunkışla and its diasporic “extensions” in and outside Turkey.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Her presentation showed the formation of an embodied knowledge through everyday performances of storytelling and singing that told the unwritten history of the village. She analyzed multiple versions of narratives of escape: escape from massacres, escape from the actual physical space of the village, and escape from a condition of being–meaning an attempt to live side by side with the perpetrators and their descendants.

Drawing on the accounts and commentaries she collected during her research, this presentation critically discusses the recently fashioned definition of “forgiveness” and “reconciliation” in Turkey. She argues that it promotes a discourse celebrating a certain kind of memory at the expense of the marginalization and stigmatization of other modes of remembrance and emotions. Her presentation interpreted the transmission of songs and stories of belonging, forced migration, loss, and survival from a perspective that challenges the mainstream discourse that is shaped by an attempt to colonize affect and collective memory.

 

Next, we heard again from Dr. Ameera Nimjee. Her presentation was called A Lifetime of Migration: Memories of Mummyjaan.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Her presentation explored the multiplicity of South Asian migration stories with a focus on a central figure: her grandmother, Mummyjaan, as her family called her. Mummyjaan was born into a Punjabi, Ismaili Muslim family, and moved from British India to Pakistan in 1947; Karachi to Eldoret a year later; and Nairobi to Toronto in 1973. She was among many waves of South Asians who traversed the Indian Ocean to establish new homes in parts of Asia and Africa, as the Indian subcontinent’s volatile borders were continuously redrawn through the twentieth century—a process that continues today.

She investigated her grandmother’s lifetime of politically driven migration through songs and stories, collected from her and her mother’s memories. She demonstrated how Mummyjaan’s migration story is typical in its very uniqueness, given her Punjabi cultural background, Ismaili Muslim upbringing, and adult life in East Africa.

She told us stories about Mummyjaan’s place in her religious context, her position with regards to race, and her relationships with ethnic communities. She connected these stories to music, by showing how they were mirrored in Mummyjaan’s musical life, which was always present in her many homes throughout her lifetime.

 

The final paired presentations of the day were under the theme Musical Life Stories.

First we heard from Dr. Svanibor Pettan, who gave a public film screening on Monday. His presentation was called Songs and Stories of Minority Musicians in Their Musical Encounters.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

In this presentation, Svanibor argued against the common perception of minorities as unified collectives engaged in institutionalized performance of respective music and dance traditions in stylized costumes. Instead, he used biography to point to the internal dynamics, marked by individual, sometimes confrontational experiences of migration and encounter. He showed us three life stories that featured Slovenian musical personalities with the Macedonian, Sinhalese, and Romani roots, active in different musical genres: Ljuben Dimkaroski (who was featured in the film screened at our Centre on Monday night), Lasanthi Mamnaranjanie Kallinga Dona, and Imer Traja Brizani.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

His presentation focused on the following questions: How do they interact within their respective minority circles and with the majority population in a less than three decades old nation-state? How these encounters affect their lives and professional careers? Nevertheless, what are the modalities of their mutual contacts? He revealed the emotional response of individuals caught in the majority-minority discourse within the broader theoretical framework of music and minority studies.

 

Next we heard from Terada Yoshitaka, who gave two public film screenings on Tuesday. His presentation was titled Performing Migrant Experiences in Japan: Ahn Sungmin and Zainichi Korean Pansori.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

Zainichi Koreans refer to those Koreans who migrated to Japan during its colonization of the Korean peninsula (1910-45). He described their presence in Japan as an eloquent testimony to the history of Japanese colonialism and to the power struggle in ensuing years between the USSR and the USA (resulting in the division of the Korean peninsula). He noted that the lived experiences and identities of Zainichi Koreans have been severely affected by the unstable and often contentious relationship between Republic of Korea (more commonly, South Korea), Democratic People’ Republic of Korea (North Korea), and Japan.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Throughout the presentation, he examined the history of Korean migrants in Japan through the activities of one contemporary artist: Ahn Sungmin. He described her personal and artistic trajectory as reflective of the hardship and hope of many Zainichi Koreans. Ahn Sungmin is a third generation Zainichi Korean from Osaka, whose mastery over the art of pansori (traditional narrative genre) is considered extraordinary by many in her community. He described her innovative performance style and introduced a newly composed pansori based on the theme of forced migration. He reflected on how this new piece of music speaks to Zainichi Koreans identities and histories and works to reclaim the past. It keeps the memory of the history alive (however painful), and reasserts Zainichi Koreans existence in an art form. Ahn Sungmin was featured in the film Crossing over the Arirang Pass: Zainichi Korean Music, screened at the McConnell Public Library on Tuesday.

 

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

 

We ended the night by hearing again from Dr. Gage Averill, though this time in a public lecture called Echoes of “Haïti Cherie” in the “koloni.”

Photo credit: Rachael Murphy

Gage explained to us that in the 1930s, an expatriate Haitian penned the nostalgic méringue “Haïti Cherie”– a classic of the Haitian patriotic canon and a foundational musical commentary on emigration. He started the presentaiton by getting us all to sing the song together.

Gage explained how Haiti has had many waves of emigration, forming the dyaspò (diaspora) in North America (1950s-present).

This transnational status of the Haitian population has been captured in thousands of songs. In these songs, there are stories that celebrate the “koloni-s” (“colonies,” Haitian communities abroad). There are also stories that bemoan the hardships of emigration and the treatment of immigrants and refugees. And there are stories that advocate for rights, or boast of newfound success. Because of all of these different (and at times contradictory) stories of Haitian emigration/immigration, they can’t be distilled into one theme.

Photo credit: Rachael Murphy

He played us examples from Skah shah, Farah Juste, Manno Charlemagne, and the Fugees. We also heard “Respect” by Tabou Combo as well as “Libète” by Magnum band. Gage explained how these songs and stories (among many others) can be read as an adaptation to a transitional identity: as these songs circulate, they come to define new boundaries and to maintain that identity; and in their diverse stories of migratory experience, they provide a narrative supporting migrants in their ongoing negotiation over status, visibility / voice, rights and identity. Perhaps more plainly, Gage described these songs as a sonic fence around people: they are a way to realize many commonalities, and to negotiate politics that transcend the nation state.

Post written by Michelle MacQueen

Today marked the first official day of the 26th International Council for Traditional Music Colloquium. We spent the day at Membertou Heritage Park. Our discussions started with acknowledging the land on which our Colloquium took place: Mi’kma’ki — the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. We talked about the history of Membertou, and also more broadly about the history between Canada and Indigenous peoples, noting that there is significant work still to done.

Photo credit: Rachael Murphy

We were honoured to have started our day by listening to the singing and drumming of Graham Marshall, David Meuse, and Bill Meuse. We thank them for sharing these songs and stories with us.

We were welcomed by Vice President Academic and Provost at Cape Breton University, Richard MacKinnon.

Photo credit: Rachael Murphy

Svanibor Pettan also welcomed us on behalf of the ICTM and gave us an overview of the organization’s mandates.

Photo credit: Rachael Murphy

Photo credit: Rachael Murphy

We  then heard from Graham Marshall, who gave a presentation called Wula Na Kinu: This Is Who We Are. Graham was born and grew up in Membertou First Nation. He speaks and sings Mi’kmaq, and is a founding member of the Sons of Membertou. The group’s first album (1995) was nominated at the East Coast Music Awards, and they performed at the Halifax G7 that same year. He recently established another drum group, The Kun’tewiktuk Singers. Marshall worked with Mi’kmaq Family and Children’s Services for more than ten years and developed a mentorship program, in which older youth are paired with younger children to provide support through traditional practices. He is dedicated to continuing Mi’kmaq culture through the practice of singing, drumming, and other traditional knowledge, and to passing these traditions and knowledge to the next generation.

As a Membertou Council Member, Graham is active in the development and actualization of Indigenous policies and governance, and in implementing the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He serves on the Council’s Executive, focusing on community and cultural development, including Indigenous tourism. Graham told us about migration and encounter particularly with stories from his own life and experience. He also introduced us to the Kun’tewiktuk play that was created through Membertou’s collaboration in an earlier research-creation project phase with Marcia Ostashewski and the Centre for Sound Communities research team. Kun’tewiktuk tells the story of the forced relocation of the Kings Road Reserve community to its current Membertou location.

Next, we had our first keynote presentation from Tina K. Ramnarine. She is Professor of music at the Royal Holloway University of London and a musician, anthropologist and global cultural explorer. Her research focuses on music in global histories, cultural heritages and identity politics, as well as arts responses to contemporary global challenges. She has carried out extensive research across the Nordic countries, especially on Finnish and Saami music. She has worked on Caribbean music, labour histories in the Indian Diaspora, and intercultural gamelan projects in Bali. Her latest publications include the edited volumes Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency, We Mark Your Memory: Writings from the Descendants of Indenture, and Dance, Music and and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora. She has broad interests in transnationalism, decolonizing scholarship and postcolonial studies.

Her talk was titled Reclaiming Indigenous Cultural Heritage in an Island of Multiple Diasporas. Looking at the island of Trinidad, she notes that until until recently, Trinidad’s Indigenous communities were mostly invisible. In the last couple of decades they have become increasingly politically active and hence visible.

Her presentation discussed reclamations of Indigenous cultural heritage in an island of multiple diasporas. Looking to music, she showed examples of parang and to the changing politics around this genre. Her discussion draws on literary insights from Wilson Harris’s The Ghost of Memory, particularly the questions he poses in relation to new histories of Indigeneity: “What is spirit? What is the New World? What is art? What is truth?”

Through her discussion of parang and sites like Pitch Lake, Tina examined how heritage sites and cultural heritage practices are dimensions of the recuperative imaginaries of the arts, overlapping with diasporic cultural histories of African enslavement and Asian indenture. She suggests that in this context, Trinidad becomes a laboratory for examining the dynamics of migration and encounter between ‘Indigenous’ and ‘diasporic’, as well as reclamations of cultural heritage across both identity categories.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Dr. Alex E. Chávez gave a public lecture and demonstration about Sonic Bridges: Home, Intimacy, and the Borderlands. He is the Nancy O’Neill Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a faculty fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies. Dr. Chávez’s research and teaching explore Latina/o/x expressive culture in everyday life as it manifests through sound, language, and performance. He has published in various academic journals, contributed to numerous prominent volumes, and his writing has been featured in public venues such as the Huffington Post and Revista Contratiempo. His book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño has won many awards, including the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of both academic research and publicly engaged work as an artist and producer.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

An accomplished musician and multi-instrumentalist, Chávez has recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores (most recently Emmy Award-winning El Despertar), and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning artists. In 2016, he produced the Smithsonian Folkways album Serrano de Corazón. 

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Alex introduced us to huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. A musician himself, Chávez has placed sound at the centre of his artistic practice, scholarship, and publicly engaged work. In this presentation, he discussed how the musico-poetic design and performance of huapango arribeño produce shared sentiments of intimacy, conviviality, and companionship. He also shared his own stories about how he has brought these insights in both his academic and creative work as a means of hearing across multiple types of borders.

Alex ended his presentation with a performance of one of his own songs.

We ended the evening with a public event by Dr. Afua Cooper. She is a senior academic trained in the history of Black people in Canada, and the African Diaspora. Her book on Canadian slavery broke new ground in the study of Canadian and Atlantic slavery and it was nominated for a Governor-General’s award, and named by the CBC as one of the best books published in Canada. A recognized poet, spoken word artist, and wordsmaestra, Afua helped found the Dub Poetry movement in Canada and organized five international Dub Poetry festivals in Canada, in addition to publishing five books of poetry and recording two poetry CDs. In recognition of her poetry she was installed in 2018 as Halifax Region’s Poet Laureate. An academic leader, Afua founded the Black Canadian Studies Association, the Dalhousie Black Faculty and Staff Caucus, and she established the Black and African Diaspora Studies Minor at Dalhousie. Her awards and achievements include: the Ontario Black History Society Daniel G. Hill Community Service Award (2019); Canadian Trailblazers Award, Historica Canada Recognition (2017); a SSHRC Scholar of Honour feature (2017); Nova Scotia Human Rights Award (2015). The impulse behind the work of this multi-disciplinary scholar/artist is democratic. She aims to bridge the gap between academe and the world at large.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Her presentation was entitled Fugitive Verses/Sonic Stories: Slavery, the Middle Passage, and the Soundscapes of Black People’s Freedom Quest.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Through a series of poetic performances, she drew on history, poetry, memory, literary archaeology, slave narratives, petitions, advertisements for runaway slave, and sale of slaves, Negro Spirituals, and dub poetry–all to tell a sonic story of the awfulness, the brilliance, the pain and anguish, and the resilience that are part and parcel of Black people’s 500-year migratory journey within Canada and the African Diaspora. From Cape Breton in the North Atlantic to the Niagara Peninsula in the south, to Victoria in the West, “Fugitive Verses” sings the Black Atlantic. Afua opened with a moving performance of The Child is Alive.

She told stories about historic figures like John Ware and Richard Pierpoint. We heard about migrations across the Atlantic in 15 Ships and about the Caribbean in Ra Ra. She also shared some very local stories in the poem Shots Rang Out On My Street Today, in conversation with the recently released Halifax Street Checks Report.

Afterwards, the audience discussed how poetry and performance as means of mobilizing public-facing scholarship, which Afua noted was one of the major successes of the recent project blackhalifax.com.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Post written by Michelle MacQueen

Today’s events began with a film screening at the Centre for Sound Communities by
Dr. Julia Byl, Assistant Professor in ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Julia’s current research focuses on archival work on music and power in Indian Ocean musical cultures. She also does ethnographic field work in East Timor where she analyzes urban music, the individual, and the transnational institution in one of the world’s newest nations.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Julia presented a film called Poets in the Living Room– a documentary film of footage and interviews, created to profile the Qureshi Archive. It features a look into Drs. Saleem and Regula Qureshi and the music parties they held in their basement. These parties began almost as soon as the Qureshi’s arrived in Edmonton in the early 1960s, and these evenings of poetry and performance allowed the rapidly-growing South Asian community to begin to know itself. The film shows us a glimpse into these ephemeral moments, where community blended into family.

Next up, we had two film screenings from Terada Yoshitaka at the McConnell Public Library in Sydney.

Terada received his PhD from the University of Washington and is Professor of ethnomusicology in the Center for Cultural Resource Studies at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan. He has been interested in how music can let migrant communities express themselves and assert their rights in a host society that may not acknowledge their contributions. He conducted research on Japanese, Filipino and Sri Lankan communities in North America as well as Okinawan and Korean communities in Japan. Terada made several films on music-making of migrant communities and he shared two of these films with us in Sydney.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

The first film we saw is called Crossing over the Arirang Pass: Zainichi Korean Music.

It focused on Koreans who migrated or who were forcefully relocated to Japan during its colonization of the Korean Peninsula (1919-45), and their descendants (known as Zainichi Koreans). The Zainichi Korean community in Japan has suffered multi-layered divisions. The title, “the Arirang Pass,” is a symbol of the hardships Zainichi Koreans have had to endure in their marginalization. The act of “crossing over” refers to this community’s difficult struggle to overcome it. The film showed us how performing songs about the Arirang Pass allows Zainichi Koreans to share their past and present struggles (among themselves and with others), connect generations, and create hope for the future. After the film, the audience had a discussion about cultural diplomacy.

The last film of the day was Drumming out a Message: Eisa and the Okinawan Diaspora in Japan.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

The film was about how Okinawans living in mainland Japan used music, dance, and drumming to create an outlet for self-expression. It focused on eisa, a form of dance traditionally performed in Okinawa during the summer bon festival. However in 1975, young Okinawans workers living in Osaka used this tradition to construct a positive identity in their geographical and cultural displacement.

The film tries to capture the voices of these young migrant workers from Okinawa and second-generation Okinawans. It shows how performing eisa counteracted the derogatory images of Okinawans in mainstream Japanese culture and also made these individuals more resistant to the adversity created by such images. In the discussion after the film, audience members learned more about the history of Okinawans in Japan and also gained some insight into the filmmaking process.

Post written by Michelle MacQueen

Monday’s events featured a public talk by Dr. Kaley Mason, titled Food, Music, and Environmental Justice in South India.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Kaley is Assistant Professor of Music at Lewis & Clark College. Prior to moving to Portland, Oregon, he was Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Labor of Music: South Indian Performers and Cultural Mobility (Oxford) and a co-editor for the forthcoming volume, Sound Alignments: Popular Music in Asia’s Cold Wars (Duke). His previous research focused on the entrepreneurial, aesthetic, and socio-political work wedding music specialists perform in the diaspora. Mason also recently co-edited a special journal issue on generational friction in musical ethnography of South Asia.

The presentation focused on the relationship between music and food in environmental justice movements in South India.  The first part of the lecture talked generally on the many ways in which music and food connect, overlap, and mutually reinforced a lot of social activities together. He showed us a list of these different gastro-musical intersection.

Photo credit: Michelle MacQueen

The second part drew on some examples on how musicians are mobilizing their art and craft to address food security issues and environmental justice in these times of climate crisis.

After the presentation, the audience talked more about the ways food and music connect including hospitality.

In the evening, we had a film screening by Dr. Svanibor Pettan.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

He is professor and chair in ethnomusicology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His academic degrees are from the universities in Croatia, Slovenia, and the United States, while his fieldwork sites include former Yugoslav lands, Australia, Egypt, Norway, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and the USA. The prevalent themes in his publications are music, politics and war, minorities, multiculturalism, gender, and applied ethnomusicology. Among his recent publications are the documentary with study-guide Kosovo Through the Eyes of Local Romani (Gypsy) Musicians and three volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, which he co-edited with Jeff Todd Titon.

He showed us a film called Tidldibab: The Oldest Flute in Ancient Times and Today.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

It is about about the archaeological find (in Slovenia, 1995) featuring the 60,000-year-old (contested) Neanderthal flute and the role of a Macedonian musician Ljuben Dimkaroski in this story.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski

Ljuben, who is the star of this documentary, passed away a couple of years ago. Ljuben and Dr. Svanibor Pettan were friends and collaborators. This film was made by Television Slovenia, the country’s national television station. Darja Korez Korencan wrote the script for the film, and Divja Baba (pseudonym) was the Director.

Photo credit: Marcia Ostashewski